Introduction

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03030-5 — The Russian Conquest of Central Asia Alexander Morrison Excerpt More Information u Introduction Russia’s movement to the East had already begun at the time of the Tatar Yoke. Mikhail Afrikanovich Terent’ev, History of the Conquest of Central Asia (1906) This book tells the story of how Central Asia became Russian. With the fall of Kazan in 1552 Medieval Muscovy had extended its frontier to the Volga. It reached the Caspian in 1556, with the capture of Astrakhan, and by the end of the sixteenth century had expanded beyond the Urals, with the destruction of the khanate of Sibir’. Over the following 200 years Russian rule in Siberia and the Urals was gradually consolidated, but until the 1820s the Russian Empire’s southern frontier in Asia remained more or less unchanged, a string of fortified outposts along the Ural and Irtysh rivers. By the early twentieth century it lay almost 1,800 miles further south; 1.5 million square miles and perhaps 6 million new subjects had been added to the Tsar’s domains. Russian Central Asia stretched from the Altai and Ala-Tau mountains in the east of what is now Kazakhstan to the deserts of Transcaspia (Turkmenistan) in the west, with a southern frontier which ran through the lofty plateaus of the Pamirs and along the Amu-Darya, the Oxus of antiquity. The basins of Central Asia’s other great rivers – the Syr-Darya, the Zarafshan, the Ili, the Murghab – all lay wholly or partially in Russian territory, as did the whole of the Aral Sea and almost the whole of the Caspian shore. The states which had existed in southern Central Asia – the khanate of Khoqand in Ferghana, the khanate of Khiva in Khwarazm and the emirate of Bukhara in the Zarafshan valley – had in the first case been destroyed, and in the latter two transformed into Russian protectorates.1 For some contemporaries this subjugation of the lands and peoples between Siberia and the Oxus was a form of revenge for the ‘Tatar Yoke’ of the 1 See Yuri Bregel, ‘The New Uzbek States: Bukhara, Khiva and Khoqand c. 1750–1886’,in The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chingissid Age ed. Nicola Di Cosmo, Allen J. Frank & Peter B. Golden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 392–411 for a more detailed description of the political geography of Central Asia before the Russian conquest. 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03030-5 — The Russian Conquest of Central Asia Alexander Morrison Excerpt More Information 2introduction thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when Muscovy had been subject to the Turco-Mongol Golden Horde.2 It was also seen as part of a wider civilising mission, which saw Russia take her place among the other European colonial empires that dominated the nineteenth-century world;3 as a means of cham- pioning the spread of Orthodox Christianity in a region most of whose population were Muslims;4 and as a reconquest by ‘Aryans’ of a region long dominated by Turkic peoples.5 Above all, it was perhaps the pre-eminent assertion of Russia’s status as a Great Power in the nineteenth century. The pace and scale of Russian territorial expansion attracted the admiration and apprehension of Russia’s rivals, and formed an important part of the ‘myth of conquest’ which underpinned the authority of the Russian monarchy.6 Central Asia’s conquest was the most spectacular example of such expansion: it was by far the most substantial territory added to the Russian empire between the Congress of Vienna and the First World War. While the individual campaigns of conquest were usually fairly brief, taken together they spanned almost a century – from the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when Russian attention began to shift away from Europe towards the empire’s Asian frontier, to the early 1900s when the last formal territorial annexation took place in the Pamirs. Russia’s new Central Asian possessions comprised a bewildering variety of landscapes, climatic zones and peoples. The steppe grasslands of the Sary-Arqa – Qazaq for ‘yellow back’–which stretched across the provinces of Ural’sk, Turgai, 2 M. A. Terent’ev, Istoriya zavoevaniya Srednei Azii s kartami i planami (St Pb.: A. V. Komarov, 1906), I, 1. See also V. V. Grigor’ev, ‘Russkaya politika v otnoshenii k Srednei Azii’,inSbornik Gosudarstvennykh Znanii I ed. V. P. Bezobrazov (St Pb.: Tip. V. P. Bezobrazov, 1874), 233–61; S. M. Seredonin, ‘Istoricheskii ocherk zavoevaniya aziatskoi Rossii’,inAziatskaya Rossiya (St Pb.: Izd. Pereselencheskago Upravleniya, 1914), I, 1–2. 3 P. P. Semenov, ‘Znachenie Rossii v kolonizatsionnom dvizhenii evropeiskikh narodov’, IIRGO 38 (1892), 349–69; Adeeb Khalid, ‘Culture and Power in Colonial Turkestan’,in CAC. Vols. 17–18. Le Turkestan russe: Une colonie comme les autres? ed. Svetlana Gorshenina & Sergej Abašin (Tashkent & Aix-en-Provence: IFEAC, Éditions De Boccard,2009), 413–47; Ulrich Hofmeister, Die Bürde des Weißen Zaren: Russische Vorstellungen einer imperialen Zivilisierungsmission in Zentralasien (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2019). 4 N. P. Ostroumov, Kitaiskie emigranty v Semirechenskoi Oblasti Turkestanskogo Kraya i rasprostranenie sredi nikh Pravoslavnogo Khristianstva (Kazan: Tip. Imperatorskogo Universiteta, 1879); Bakhtiyar Babajanov, ‘How Will We Appear in the Eyes of inovertsy and inorodtsy? Nikolai Ostroumov on the Image and Function of Russian Power’, CAS 33/ 2 (2014), 270–88. 5 M. I. Veniukov, ‘Postupatel’noe dvizhenie Rossii v Srednei Azii’,inSbornik Gosudarstvennykh Znanii III ed. V. P. Bezobrazov (St Pb.: Tip V. Bezobrazova, 1877), 60; Marlène Laruelle, Mythe aryen et rêve impérial dans la Russie du XIXe siècle (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2005), 138–9. 6 Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in the Russian Monarchy. Vol. I. From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 26–30, 42–51; Vol. II. From Alexander II to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 6–15. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03030-5 — The Russian Conquest of Central Asia Alexander Morrison Excerpt More Information introduction 3 Akmolinsk and Semipalatinsk – shaded into the lakes and pine forests of Siberia on their northern fringe. To their south lay the Turkestan governor-generalship, whose two northernmost provinces, Semirechie and Syr-Darya, also included much steppe country: in Semirechie this was bounded by the Ili river and the shallow waters of Lake Balkhash in the north, and by the snow-capped Tian-Shan rangeinthesouth,whileinSyr-Daryathegrasslandandsaxaul-studdedscrub faded into the Qizil-Qum (Red Sands) south-east of the Aral Sea. All of this territory was inhabited primarily by nomadic or semi-nomadic Qazaqs, apart from scattered fortresses and small urban settlements with mixed Russian and Tatar populations. At the southern tip of Syr-Darya province lay Tashkent, the largest city of Central Asia and the administrative centre of the Turkestan governor-generalship. It sat on the threshold between the nomadic regions to the north – historically known as the Dasht-i Qipchaq,or‘Plain of the Qipchaqs’–and the irrigated basin between the Syr-Darya and Amu-Darya, known by the Arabic name of Ma wara’ al-nahr,or‘the land beyond the river’–Transoxiana in English – where most of Central Asia’s historic cities were located. By the nineteenth century the most agriculturally rich region of the sedentary zone was the Ferghana valley, core of the brash new khanate of Khoqand, whose population had probably overtaken that of the Zarafshan valley – with its ancient urban centres of Bukhara and Samarkand – in the late eighteenth century, as it grew rich on trade with Qing China.7 The third of the great agricultural oases of Central Asia was Khwarazm, a relatively isolated region in the delta of the Amu-Darya, south of the Aral Sea, alternating desert and marshland and centred on the city of Khiva. The settled oases of Central Asia were gentle landscapes of poplars and irrigation canals, intensively cultivated and managed as peasant smallholdings interspersed with compact villages and walled towns. Theirinhabitantswere known generically by the Russians as ‘Sarts’–atermofdisputedoriginwhich by the late nineteenth century was used as a blanket label for the Turkic-speaking sedentary population of Central Asia.8 The ruling dynasties and elites of Bukhara, Khoqand and Khiva were Uzbeks, descended from a group of Qipchaq Turkic tribes which had migrated from the steppe to Transoxiana in the sixteenth century. In Khwarazm there were also Qaraqalpaqs (a settled people speaking a language similar to Qazaq) and Turkmen. These groups were all Turkic-speaking Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school, but in Bukhara and Samarkand there were also significant numbers of Tajiks (i.e. Persian-speakers), Jews and Iranis(Shi‘i 7 Scott Levi, The Rise and Fall of Khoqand 1709–1876: Central Asia in the Global Age (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 2017), 23; Laura Newby, The Empire and the Khanate: A Political History of Qing Relations with Khoqand c. 1760–1860 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 184–209. 8 On the ‘Sart’ question see Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 187–90; Sergei Abashin, Natsionalizmy v Srednei Azii: V poiskakh identichnosti (St Pb.: Aleteia, 2007), 99–176. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03030-5 — The Russian Conquest of Central Asia Alexander Morrison Excerpt More Information 4introduction Muslims, the descendants of Persian slaves). To the east of the Zarafshan and Ferghana valleys lay the great mountain massifoftheTian-ShanandTurkestan ranges, and ultimately the Pamir plateau and the Himalayas.

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